


Sumerian

by trench_lorefare



Category: Tokyo Babylon, X -エックス- | X/1999
Genre: Body Horror, M/M, Suicidal Ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:14:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21755107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trench_lorefare/pseuds/trench_lorefare
Summary: "I can't," he answered, "I have to wait for the world to end."Original draft posted in late 2008/2009 for an LJ challenge,"ten years later." Current draft updated to reflect the fact that it's... twenty years later. Oof.
Relationships: Sakurazuka Seishirou/Sumeragi Subaru
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	Sumerian

His dreams have changed very little in the past twenty years. Perhaps it’s foolish, but no small part of him hopes that this is a sign of latent dream-seeing.

In these visions, he watches how Babylon dies, the empire of shopping centers and apartment blocks laid to waste by seven seals and seven harbingers. First fall the kekkai, and then fall the burning rains. The air chokes. The sea, mother of all life, swells and sweeps her children back into her arms. Acid waves rock them to sleep. For once, the noise stops.  
  
At the end of things, she claims Tokyo, washing away landfill and concrete.

So falls the Tower.  
  
But when Sumeragi Subaru wakes, all is as it was. The year is 2019. _2020 in a few minutes_ he must remind himself. Today is New Year’s Eve, or so claims the reporter on the television screen.  
  
He feels disoriented during the holiday season – like he’s plummeted through space after missing a stair, or as if he’s miscounted time all together. At 44, he struggles to recall where the years have gone. He struggles to remember much at all.

  
-

When his sister visits, she appears on the balcony, and she always asks the same question with her eyes.

"I can't," Subaru replies sullenly. "I have to wait for the world to end."

Hokuto doesn’t pretend to be happy with the answer, but he knows that she accepts it, as she has every year for so long now. He can tell her anything. He always could.

Before she goes, Hokuto winds her arms around his shoulders, resting her chin on the top of his head. Although the sensation is delicate as lantern-light, he can feel it. She only frees an arm to point away from his apartment, into the evening air.

Tonight, every window is bright; the reflection of countless neon signs and florescent bulbs transforms the city into a jewel. This was a place he loved once — Tokyo was home, the only place he ever belonged. For a single, flickering moment, he loves it again.

However, he suspects that Hokuto sees something that he doesn’t, that she’s not pointing _at_ the glittering cityscape, but through it. When she looks back at him, her eyebrows draw together, and she begins to cry.

At least, he assumes she’s crying.

He can never quite hear her.

-

Occasionally, Seishirou will visit too, though not for long. He just smiles and leans against the kitchen counter as though he belongs there.

The older man observes him quietly, allowing the uncharacteristically talkative Sumeragi to fill the silence with busy chatter about news, or weather, or —

— anything really, to avoid talking about what’s important.

“The sakura are only at half-bloom, and the parks are already packed.”

_Take back your stupid title. You cheated me._

“The repairs are almost done. You’d never believe that anything happened here.”

_I almost jumped. More than once. But there was no bridge to jump from._

“There’s a new aquarium. Where the one in Sunshine City was. It’s supposed to be bigger.”

_I have loved you since I was a child._

Every time Seishirou visits, Subaru thinks that maybe his pulse will stop thundering in his ears long enough for him finally say something. He will. He should. He should have said everything a long time ago. What could he possibly have left to lose?

He can’t.

Even now. Not now.

If Seishirou is tired of waiting, he never says so. At least that’s a comfort - neither of them was ever very good at letting go.

Sometimes Seishirou vanishes as though he’d never been there; sometimes he exits through the door. As he sees his guest out, Subaru tries not to catch their reflection in the mirror by the genkan, and not only because Seishirou looks so smug when he catches the younger man watching.

The image of them in one frame unsettles him, somehow. At first he thought it was just nerves chewing at the inside of his stomach, or guilt. Seishirou is the same as he always was: handsome, cold, _perfect_. Hollow eye sockets change nothing. He is even used to his own mismatched stare, but —

 _Seishirou-san isn’t_ supposed _to be older than me anymore._

The thought curdles, threatens to spoil everything, decays the thin membrane between normal and _wrong wrong wrong everything’s wrong._

If he closes his eyes, the panic will pass. It’s best to settle into the vague feeling that, as usual, he is just missing something.

-  
  


Subaru does very little besides hosting strange guests. There are no jobs. The cryptic faxes from anonymous bureaucrats ceased a month or two after he first received them. Eventually, he stopped checking the machine altogether; when his grandmother passed, there was no one left to be worried. Even the tree became silent.

The first months were challenging. Her will washed over him, at first in ripples, then in waves of cruel hunger so deep they felt rooted in his bones.

That, he could deal with. He’d experienced worse. It was the shock.

It was the uncomprehending expression on his victims’ faces when his fingers finally slipped the wet surface of their vertebrae and reemerged in the open air behind their backs.

 _That_ cut deep. At first.

Given enough time, remaining cold while up to the elbows in warm blood is _nothing._

The one blessing that Subaru regularly counts is that he does not hear them anymore, the voices of ghosts or spirits. It’s for the best. As far as he knows, he lost all his powers, including what was left of his empathy. He can’t imagine trying the console the lingering dead now.

He can’t even pretend to be kind.

  
-  
  
The former Dragons of Earth are nothing if not irritating. They pass on the street, always in groups of two or three, faces grim. Perhaps they are still waiting for the apocalypse as much as he is. _Like a cult_ , Subaru sometimes thinks, because that's certainly what they look like, with the tattered hems of their cloaks whisking across the pavement. What's left of the Seals is no better. He tries sometimes to speak to them — honestly, he can’t blame them for ignoring him.

  
He might have well been speaking Sumerian for all they understood.  
  
-

  
A searching spell is simple enough to teach, even if he can no longer perform one. The girl cannot contain a delighted gasp when her ofuda finally folds itself into the shape of a sparrow and shakily flaps its wings. When she bows, the sleeves of her shikifuku flop awkwardly. It’s too big, and she’s not used to wearing it.

"Thank you, Sumeragi-sama," she says softly, large brown eyes glancing up shyly though the veil of her bangs. Being timid must be a family tendency, he thinks, as is apparently wandering where one is not meant to be.

The kid is one of his distant cousins, likely intended to inherit the role as clan head, and one of the only Sumeragi still willing to speak to him. Which is fair.

She’s too young to know better.

"But…why are you still _here_?"  
  
Subaru asks her what she means, but the girl blushes and stammers _never mind_. After he ushers her away in the direction of her home, they never meet again, and Subaru decides to dismiss the question. Per usual, he is missing something.  
  
-  
  
In a few minutes, it will be twenty years since 1999.  
  
_Twenty years since the Day of Judgment._  
  
_Twenty years he cannot remember, but that's all right, the dead rarely do._  
  
When the clock strikes midnight, a bell chimes, champagne pops, the news caster wishes a Happy New Year, and the world hasn't ended.

Admittedly, Subaru is disappointed.

**Author's Note:**

> Original Draft: https://x2009.livejournal.com/11563.html#cutid1


End file.
